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Category Archives: Podcasts

My new podcast, What’s New, has launched, and I’m truly excited about the opportunity to explore new ideas and discoveries on the show. What’s New will cover a wide range of topics, from the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and technology, and it is intended for anyone who wants to learn new things. I hope that you’ll subscribe today on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud.

I hugely enjoyed doing the Digital Campus podcast that ran from 2007-2015, and so I’m thrilled to return to this medium. Unlike Digital Campus, which took the format of a roundtable with several colleagues from George Mason University, on What’s New I’ll be speaking largely one-on-one with experts, at Northeastern University and well beyond, to understand how their research is changing our understanding of the world, and might improve the human condition. In a half-hour podcast you’ll come away with a better sense of cutting-edge scientific and medical discoveries, the latest in public policy and social movements, and the newest insights of literature and history.

I know that the world seems impossibly complex and troubling right now, but one of themes of What’s New is that while we’re all paying closer attention to the loud drumbeat of social media, there are people in many disciplines making quieter advances, innovations, and creative works that may enlighten and help us in the near future. So if you’re looking for a podcast with a little bit of optimism to go along with the frank discussion of the difficulties we undoubtedly face, What’s New is for you.

1) The openness and standards of the web produce generative platforms. The magic of the web is that from relatively simple technical specifications and interoperability arise an incredibly varied and constantly innovative set of genres. For those wedded to traditional forms such as the book and article, this can be difficult to understand and accept.

2) Interfaces shape genres. Tracing the history of web applications used to make blogs, from early link aggregators to the blank page of WordPress 3’s full-screen writing environment, shows this in action. Humanities blogs shifted in helpful ways over the last 15 years, into modes that should be more acceptable to the academy, as these interfaces changed. Being in control of these interfaces is important as we continue to develop online scholarship.

3) Communities define practice. Conventions around web genres are created by those participating in them. This has serious implications for what the academy might be able to do with the web in the future.

You can hear about these three main points and much more in the talk, which is available as a podcast or audio stream near the bottom of this page. Part of the talk comes from chapter 1 of The Ivory Tower and the Open Web.

The flawed launch of Google Buzz, with its privacy nightmare of exposing the social graph of one’s email account, makes me, Tom, Mills, and Amanda French consider the major issue of online privacy on this week’s Digital Campus podcast. Covering several stories, including Facebook attacks on teachers and teachers spying on students, we think about the ways in which technology enables new kinds of violations on campus—and what we should do about it. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

For the past few months I’ve neglected to reblog in this space the availability of fresh new Digital Campus podcasts for your listening pleasure. Below is a list of the major topics of each of those episodes—if you’re new to the podcast, pick one that sounds interesting and give it a listen. Or just subscribe to the podcast to have fresh episodes delivered automatically to iTunes or your favorite podcatcher.

Important changes have arrived in this span of podcasts as well. After being the “show runner” for the first fifty episodes (doing the voice-overs and guiding the discussion in my best impression of a late-night jazz host), the other regulars on the podcast, Tom Scheinfeldt and Mills Kelly, will assume these duties (along with me) on a rotating basis starting with Digital Campus #51, “The Inevitable iPad.” In addition, we’ve been joined by a rotation of “irregulars” who greatly liven up the proceedings and actually have intelligent things to say.

This week’s podcast looks at the fake, the real, the copies, and the bizarre: fake journals from Elsevier, the MPAA telling teachers to film their TVs, the University of Michigan asking for real uses for its copies of Google’s book scans, and Wolfram Alpha’s use of sources. Mills and I also give Tom a parenting quiz appropriate to the digital age. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

OK, don’t get too excited by the title. Actually, do get excited if you want a freewheeling discussion of possible futures and business models (thus the title) for academic publishing. That’s just part of the roundtable chatter this time on the podcast. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Although we covered the topic in depth in 2007 on Digital Campus #16, we simply had to revisit the idea—and the reality—of e-books on the latest episode of the podcast given interesting new developments. With the launch of the Kindle 2 and the mobile version of Google Book Search (which yours truly nailed as a prediction on Digital Campus #35), Tom, Mills, and I once again debate the merits of electronic books. And through the magic of podcasting, we are able to talk with our former selves via flashbacks. We also cry crocodile tears over the demise of Ruckus and Juicy Campus, look at history in Google Earth 5, and discuss YouTube’s new licensing and download functionality. Plus, as always, our picks for useful sites, reading, and software. [Subscribe to this podcast.]